In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic by Jeremy Engels
  • Emma Stapely
Jeremy Engels. Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010). Pp. xi, 316. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $59.95.

Jeremy Engels’s Enemyship contributes to a growing body of scholarship that argues for the contraction of radical democratic possibility in the United States immediately following the American Revolution. Influential recent studies in this line such as Rosemarie Zagarri’s Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) and Terry Bouton’s Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2009) have told this story through the lenses of gender and class conflict, respectively, underscoring the betrayal of ordinary white men and women by their governments in what they and others have convincingly argued was a reactionary—even counterrevolutionary—political atmosphere during the 1780s–1790s. Engels, an assistant professor of communications at Pennsylvania State University, offers a new perspective on this narrative of declension by emphasizing the role of rhetorical strategy in its unfolding. Charting a course through histories of unrest in the early Republic from Shays’s Rebellion to Fries’s Rebellion and the response to the Alien and Sedition acts, Engels shows how elites adapted rhetorical practices of “naming and denouncing enemies” (17), once central to justifying the Revolution’s “state-toppling violence” (5), into techniques of governance aimed at producing “a national identity, socioeconomic stability, and more obedient citizens” (31). Engels thus tracks the practice of identifying enemies—or “enemyship”—as it transformed from a strategy of revolutionary liberation into a technology of state-building designed to extort the consent of the governed in a culture of fear.

Engels’s exploration of how rhetoric organized political identification and allegiance in the Revolutionary period represents a potentially exciting alternative to more traditional histories oriented toward the discovery of the Revolution’s economic or ideological origins. With this attention to the power of language, Engels takes an expansive measure of the forces that motivated historical actors and of the strategies by which those actors attempted to move one another.

In the book’s first and most compelling chapter, Engels traces “enemy-ship” through Common Sense (1776), in which Thomas Paine argued that the colonies’ connection to the mother country did not bind them together as [End Page 318] reliably as it drew them into conflict with Britain’s enemies: “France and Spain never were, nor perhaps ever will be our enemies as Americans, but as our being the subjects of Great Britain” (44). For Paine, “enemyship” named a state or condition of antagonistic relation, but Engels shifts to consider it in more performative terms, as a “rhetorical architecture” (35) that can be mobilized to produce such identifications. Indeed, he argues that both Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence employed this architecture to urge the cause of revolution during the 1770s. Engels is ambivalent about Paine’s “decision to name the enemy” (60), however. On the one hand, Paine’s goal in deploying this strategy was “to encourage Americans to fight for their independence” (59), generating new possibilities for concerted democratic action in a moment of danger. On the other hand, Engels writes, Paine’s recourse to the rhetorics of enemyship “corrupted democracy by turning it towards the creation and preservation of dangerously unstable homogeneities of friend and enemy, Whig and Tory, revolutionary and criminal” (62).

In the richness of this ambivalence, Engels proffers a troubling glimpse of Revolutionary politics in which the distinction between radical and reactionary positions may be less clear, less governable, than we might have hoped. As such, this reading of Paine offers a potential challenge to Engels’s own historiographical premise, adopted from Gordon S. Wood, that the Revolution stands unproblematically as a radical moment whose visionary promise was compromised only after the fact. Engels concludes, however, that Paine’s—and, indeed, Jefferson’s—deployments of enemyship are ultimately liberatory ideals whose “unintended consequences” were subsequently elaborated by the founders in a more sinister key (65).

Engels moves on, in chapters 2–4, to...

pdf

Share